NYS Executive Chamber OPMI @govkathyhochul | Past: Fiscal Policy @CenterNYC, Oceanography @columbia @Lamont_Doherty, @NYSA_Majority | Opinions my own 🏗️ 🇺🇸
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Joined June 2018
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Today, I announce my appointment to the New York State Executive Chamber of our 57th Governor, @GovKathyHochul. I will serve the people of our great state as the Senior Policy Advisor for Data and Technology Strategy at the Office of Performance Management and Innovation (OPMI), a novel initiative established by the Governor herself earlier this year.
I’m thrilled to be working with Dan Steinberg, a truly visionary public servant. Dan has served the City of New York as its Director of Operations under Mayors de Blasio, Adams, and Mamdani, inaugurating the Dynamic Mayor’s Management Report, and was among the leaders of the City’s historic data analytics team central to its COVID operations during the pandemic.
What will we be doing? A lot: simply put, we will be charged with building intelligible performance metrics and orchestrating data engineering to assist decision makers all across state government. Most especially, as the challenges of governance become more complex, our work will spearhead more cross-agency initiatives. We will be a shop that helps every apparatus of the state government develop capabilities to implement the Governor’s ambitious agenda across building thousands of new housing units, ensuring energy security and affordability in building out nuclear and renewable energy generation assets statewide, expanding child care access, and more.
I couldn’t be joining at a more exciting time. From the Governor’s push to expand New York’s nuclear energy fleet to SEQRA reform that clears the way for new housing, transit, and clean energy, our state stands at the threshold of an abundant future. It’s time for our state to build the future: Excelsior!
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
David's reason for taking the class, in his own words: "There's many really interesting ideas in climate science and public policy. But someone needs to actually do the work of taking that concept and being able to ship a product from that."
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
This is BIG. @aflcio just endorsed our bipartisan permitting reform bill. BAAJA means new, family-supporting jobs and a brighter clean energy future.
Homework, along with a self-reminder to fulfill my adulthood aspiration to own a premium laser color printer for home use
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David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
Great to see @drvolts confronting his audience about BAAJA like this. The status quo for clean energy infrastructure is awful. This compromise is a significant upgrade, if your goal is to contain energy costs and address climate change. No surprise, he's getting pilloried though.
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
🚨BAAJA now includes Nuclear (!!) and help for communities dealing with data centers!
In addition to technical fixes and important concessions to Tribal interests, the BAAJA amendment adds cool new several new provisions! 🧵
1. Nuclear: A whole new title with targeted fixes for nuclear
– Removes requirements for trial-style hearings if nobody requests one
– Allows companies to begin preliminary construction before final licensing (operation still requires licensing)
– Clarifies timelines for licensing decisions
– Allows NRC to pay officials more in order to hire more senior staff
2. Program to support communities dealing with data centers:
– New program at DOE to provide communities with information on the costs and effects of data centers.
– DOE is required to support individual communities that request info on how data centers will affect local electricity, water, the local economy, etc.
3. Fix for wildfire prevention
– The Clean Air Act puts limits on air particulate pollution that states have to stay under. Current rules say "exceptional events" like wildfires do not count towards those limits
– Prescribed burns are intentional fires used to clear underbrush and prevent disastrous wildfires.
– Current rules do not always exempt prescribed burns from counting towards clean air limits, disincentivizing states from conducting important wildfire prevention
– The new amendment fixes this, allowing controlled burns to count as an "exceptional event"
4. Reauthorizing brownfield clean up:
– The bipartisan infrastructure law created a program for cleaning up abandoned industrial sites. That program's authorization lapsed in 2023
– BAAJA authorizes the program through 2031 up to $200M per year.
nitter.gq/SiegelScribe/status/21…
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
Part of the problem with “economic populism” discourse is it simultaneously means broadly accepted ideas on the left like raising taxes on the wealthy & corporations, regulating social media companies & AI companies, and increased government intervention in the healthcare market. (All of this mainstream lib economists agree with)
And then there is this intellectual vanguard that also call their project economic populism but they are focused on eliminating the influence of economists, resurrecting tariffs, and treating tons of normal private market activity as presumptively suspect/worthy of govt intervention.
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
BAAJA is an opportunity for Democrats to return to holistic energy policy that balances reliability, affordability, and sustainability.
@IrvingSwisher and I wrote about it for The Argument. theargumentmag.com/p/climate…
Today, I wrap up my final day at the Center for New York City Affairs @CenterNYC as the Fiscal Policy Analyst.
Many highlights to share, but chief among them is my work with Lauren Melodia on building a dynamic cost model for the proposed universal public child care plan that has dominated local policy circuits for the last year.
I was finally able to check off my long-sought after goal of getting cited in @nytimes, and one reporter asked @NYCMayor directly over the summer about the $9 billion cost estimate we came up with. It's not every day that one of the great political icons of our time is made aware of your research! 🗽
I can't wait to share what is next for me. More on that next week :-)
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Political newcomers will never appreciate the glory of committing the greatest piece of 2000’s political satire to memory
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David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
It seems to me that democracy has on the whole worked very well in America over the last decade, and perhaps better than in any other major country in the West. National outcomes have repeatedly been responsive to underlying voter preferences on meaningful questions, and significant changes in policy have ensued. I’ve been reading Democracy in America this past week, and it’s striking how much it still rhymes nearly two centuries later.
The space of political and policy possibility is made concrete by understanding that institutions, and the country itself, has some degree of inertia. Call it a pseudo-“Newton’s Third Law” of politics. Momentum doesn’t come for free!
I think political debates about electability would be clearer if people would just admit that they are willing to bear some losses or slimmer margins in pursuit of their policy goals. That's totally reasonable! I am too!
Then we can have a debate about whether those losses are worth it.
For instance -- Dems passed the Civil Rights Act and lost the South. FDR won Assad-level margins in part by eschewing racial liberalism (see: anti-lynching bills). Republicans spent 50 years trying to overturn Roe and paid for it at the ballot box.
The relevant questions are: a) Is what you're losing votes for worth it b) do you lose *so* many votes that you can't even enact policy c) are you spurring a backlash that wipes out gains that you made?
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David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
We’re launching a new initiative today focused on modular housing called the Northeast Offsite Construction Collaborative.
NOCC brings together all 9 northeast region state governments and housing agencies to advance policies supporting offsite construction.
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
Fractal Campus (@fractaltechnyc) is a civic tech hub and civics itself, among many other things
I’m extremely lucky to be in a position to actually meet with officials in New York State and City government on a routine basis to share tools I made with AI engineering.
I would not have these skills where they are now without @fractaltechnyc’s AI accelerator. Sign up today!
I’m extremely lucky to be in a position to actually meet with officials in New York State and City government on a routine basis to share tools I made with AI engineering.
I would not have these skills where they are now without @fractaltechnyc’s AI accelerator. Sign up today!
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
Democrats won big and their priority is addressing high costs, a main issue they just used to win the midterms. Three ways they can do that:
1. Pass the permitting bill this month: it will lower utility bills for every American (and lower emissions too)
2. Follow up on ROAD to Housing to build more homes
3. Adopt other countries’ lower-cost transit construction policies in the surface reauthorization bill so we build more transit faster
David “Build Back NYS” Lee 🌎 retweeted
The voters are sending a clear message tonight:
It's time to pass permitting reform.
